JupyterHub Question Board

This JupyterHub service provides a simple board for users to record questions for an instructor. It is designed to store questions to be addressed in an office hour at the Data Incubator. Users can submit questions, vote for questions they're interested in, and close their questions if they desire. Admins can close (and reopen) any question.

Requirements

The service consists of a two parts: a server component written in Flask, and a client component using Svelte. The server needs Python 3.7 or newer to run. The client needs node.js 10 or newer to build.

Building

Run make svelte to build the client components. This requires npm to be available. Run make wheel to build a Python wheel, which includes both the server and client components.

Running

The question board will run only as a JupyterHub service, as it relies on JupyterHub for user information. Additionally, it uses the environmental variable JHQB_STORE to determine where it should persist the question data. If the variable is not set, /tmp will be used.

Locally

This repo includes a sample jupyterhub_config.py files for running the question board in a local JupyterHub deployment. Questions will be persisted in jhqb_store in the current directory. It is expected that you will have to adapt this configuration file for any purpose other than testing.

On Kubernetes

The question board can run as a hub-managed service on Kubernetes. You will need to install it in your hub image. Then add to your config.yaml file.

hub:
  services:
    questions:
      url: 'http://hub:8123'
      command: ['flask', 'run', '--host=0.0.0.0', '--port=8123']
      environment:
        FLASK_APP: jhqb
        JHQB_STORE: /srv/jupyterhub

You may also need to adjust your networkPolicy or extraPorts to expose port 8123 properly. See the example for how to do that on up-to-date Zero-to-JupyterHub.

The extraPorts config will not work in Z2JH 0.10.*. In this case, edit the hub service by hand (kubectl edit svc hub). At the bottom of the file, in spec.ports, add an entry

- port: 8123
  protocol: TCP
  targetPort: 8123
  name: questions